CNN apparently at first misunderstood the Supreme Court ruling on ObamaCare this morning, and blasted a headline to the nation that said “Mandate struck down.” Here’s a screenshot taken at 10:11am EST:

22 minutes later, they realized their blunder and came out with a new headline that said the exact opposite: “UPHELD.” Here’s a screenshot taken at 10:33am EST:

This is embarrassing enough on its own, but it had a major ripple effect across the nation: Since CNN was among the very first news sites to announce the court’s decision, dozens of blogs, news aggregators and other sites repeated CNN’s original assessment, creating all sorts of confusion when other news outlets suddenly contradicted CNN’s original claim.

This post is not about analyzing the court’s decision and its significance — thousands of other pundits are doing that as we speak — it’s just freezeframing CNN’s brief blunder forever, a 21st-century version of “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

4 Comments, 4 Threads

I suspect many news organizations did what Murdoch started. They would write a pre-canned full story for each of the possibilities and then release the one that actually went that way. That way, they’d gain readers.

Unfortunately, it looks like CNN put the wrong story up. How nice to see that they pulled a page from the FOX playbook. –Yeah, they hate FOX, but they’ll steal a good idea from anyone, even a baby.